


wild things were falling to the earth

by tillwehavefaces



Category: Close range: Wyoming stories - Annie Proulx, The Mud Below - Annie Proulx
Genre: Anal Gaping, Anal Sex, Anxiety, BAT (Blonds Always Top), Beating, Bottom Diamond Felts, Breathplay, Choking, Coming Untouched, Death Threat/Attempted Murder, Degradation, Dirty Talk, Discussed Amputation, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Face-Fucking, Facials, Fainting, Height Kink, Humiliation, Hurt and a very little Comfort, Injured Sex, Large Cock, M/M, Mind Break, Not Beta Read, Not the ‘nice’ kind and you know what I mean by that, Older Man/Younger Man, Oral Sex, Painful Sex, Playlist, Prescription Drug Use/Abuse, Rapist Raped as Punishment, Rough Sex, Seriously this is a lot, Size Difference, Size Kink, Slapping, Smoke Sharing, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicidal Thoughts, Unsafe Insane and Nonconsensual, Verbal Abuse, Watersports, alternative title: 19k words of Diamond suffering and cumming, hey look a close range fic for a story other than brokeback, implied/referenced past underage sex, kinda hard to explain, painal, piss drinking, revenge rape, violent rape, wrote 19k words no one will ever read RIP me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:22:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29736585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tillwehavefaces/pseuds/tillwehavefaces
Summary: ‘Diamond Felts, a constellation of moles on his left cheek, dark hair cropped to the skull, was more than good-looking when cleaned up and combed, in fresh shirt and his neckerchief printed with blue stars, but for most of his life he had not known it. Five-foot three, rapping, tapping, nail-biting, he radiated unease. A virgin at eighteen—not many of either sex in his senior class in that condition—his tries at changing the situation went wrong and as far as his despairing thought carried him, always would go wrong in the forest of tall girls. There were small women out there, but it was the six-footers he mounted in the privacy of his head.’
Relationships: Diamond Felts/OMC
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Rare Fic





	wild things were falling to the earth

**Author's Note:**

> SO. Literally the entire extent of my knowledge of cowboys, the rodeo world, Wyoming, and how people from there think and speak is from this short story collection and a moderate amount of Googling. I apologise in advance for any egregious errors, which are entirely the result of my own ignorance.
> 
> Also: goes without saying I could never come within a mile of Proulx’s prose. I have not attempted to (much).
> 
> [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4h1Q0oCNTh9wMEosZ6LTpE?si=VZ7dn1ygSOSIQ9k6ADdvMA)

> Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

—Samuel Johnson

It’s not long before it becomes clear to both of them it ain’t gonna work. Diamond isn’t working at all, obviously, so right now his only function is driving Pake Bitts to where he needs to be. The problem is Diamond just isn’t in a fit state to drive, and won’t be for a long while. Pake, on the other hand, still needs to sleep occasionally. It’s a parting, like Diamond and the bull’s back, that he sees in hindsight has been coming on for a while.

‘You got somewhere to heal up?’

Diamond thinks about going home, thinks about the last time he went home. Pearl would be thirteen now. He thinks about taking the car out one night and driving off the freeway into some black-bottomed gulch.

He shrugs his one good arm.

Pake, evidently having one of his occasional clairvoyant turns, says, ‘Guess it’s a long road back home for you, brother, if I remember right what you told me. Longer, if you gotta stop ever night.’

‘Don’t you worry bout me,’ Diamond says roughly. ‘Take care of my own damn self.’

It carries on not working for a few weeks before Bitts decides to jettison the dead weight, only he puts it more politely.

‘Got you a driver,’ he says one morning, when Diamond is rising from a night full of pain but empty of sleep.

‘Bullrider?’

‘Naw. He's a big fan, though.’

Diamond snorts. ‘Like a buckle buffer?’

‘He just wants to see the country a lil bit.’

‘He got money?’ Diamond demands. He ain’t giving out free rides to dumbfuck hayseeds who wanna ‘see the country’, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. Fuck is there to see?

‘Easy, brother,’ says Bitts, looking for once inscrutable, no mean feat for a guy with his face. ‘He can pay his way. Like I said, just wants to see the country. Big fan a rodeo.’

Diamond’s still sceptical, but he knows he’s in no position to play dentist with gift horses. Had he been in Pake’s position, he’da done the same thing, and sooner. What’s the damn use of a one-armed cowboy?

When Pake’s replacement turns up, Diamond does a honest-to-god spittake. ‘This some kinda joke?’

‘What?’ says the kid, bubblegum squeaking. He looks sincerely clueless and Diamond doesn’t doubt he is. This boy is country born and bred; has gold waves down to his shoulders like he carried his cornfields with him. His teeth are white like new ivory and his eyes are the shade of blue that makes middle-aged women go watery at the womb.

And he's seven foot fuck knows, Diamond doesn't—he tops out too high up for him to tell. He reckons he looks a fool just about snapping his neck off to speak to him, so he doesn't, just says whatever he has to say, which is not much, to his flannelled chest—stained, he notices, stained eggy-white, like Man Mountain jerks off all over himself without taking his shirt off or cleaning up after. He doesn't like not being able to see what's going on over his head, whether Sasquatch is grinning or glaring or pulling funny faces at him.

The kid lopes round to the driver’s seat, claps a hand on the roof and Diamond would swear the car drops an inch nearer the ground.

‘You gonna fit in there?’

‘I'll fit’, he says. And smiles like it's a private joke between him and his ego. Diamond dislikes him already.

He fits, by pushing the seat as far back as it’ll go, and sort of slumping down so his legs are tucked under the glovebox. Diamond’s mother would probably say something about posture. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t, to this kid.

He's a sight prettier to look at than Leecil, and doesn't preach like Bitts. Doesn't say anything, in fact, except a mumbled _gotta piss_ twice or thrice, which is Diamond's cue to stare at the glovebox till The Okie that Ate Cleveland drops back into his seat (taking about a year off the car's lifespan each time, from the sounds she makes).

Despite this taciturnity, he isn't a crotchscratcher, though he does, the whole damn ride, like he's got crabs or something. Diamond can't imagine a woman getting close enough to give him any because holy damn, Diamond hadn't been shortchanged, but this kid is fuckin _pro-por-tion-al_. And while Diamond might have once been at that turgid age when he couldn’t keep his hands off his dick, he has no interest in a dive down memory hole.

But he's no knothead, though Diamond can see the head, the outline almost clear as day through what had to be the rattiest, wornest pair of jeans this side of the Mexico border. There's a hole a few inches west of Bigdick's fly, and every so often he shifts in his seat and Diamond sees a little pink flash of flesh beneath the blue.

But, all that notwithstanding, he has this kind of smarmy intelligence about him, this sense of only just-submerged superiority, despite being a nobrain noname nofuckingbody from buttfuck, Oklahoma, that makes Diamond want to deck him and leave him in the dust whence he came. Except Diamond may be a hothead but he ain't no fool, and he knows tangling with Tyrannoteen would be one rodeo he ain't winning, even if he weren't being held more-or-less together by plaster and painkillers.

He's eighteen and a half, and his name's Slayton.

By the time they pull into the weedy parking lot of the cheapest-looking of the cheap-looking motels they’ve passed, Slayton is half-asleep and driving on autopilot, Diamond watching him anxiously. He taps him on the shoulder, none too gently, and Slayton huffs awake and upright, the sound and movement both so animal-like Diamond remembers when he told Bitts, if bulls could drive…

When they get out Hungasaurus stretches and the little shit has a boner. Might have had one the whole ride, far as Diamond knows. There's a revelation of lean hairless belly and taut muscles that don’t look like the product of any farm. He keeps stretching, up and up like a human telescope, while something cracks in the stratosphere, and Diamond's half-worried he'll poke holes in the ceiling of stars that’s been installed above them while they were rattling through the underpass.

Outside the motel room (bath, two singles), Slayton hauls out his cock (no underwear, Diamond notes) and pisses on the lawn, showy and obnoxious.

Diamond, thinking maybe he was wrong about the kid not being a concrete-head, says, ‘There's a pisser inside.’ A sudden kick of pain under his armpit puts bite into it.

Slayton looks over his shoulder with a shitty little twinkle in his eye. ‘Figured the grass could use some waterin, shortstuff.’

Diamond seethes, but says nothing. He swings around to look at the motel, thinking he should go inside, but doesn't. When he finally hears the stream peter out he turns back, as if tugged on a fishing line.

As if he knows he's got an audience again, as if that's what he was waiting for, Slayton doesn't just shake-‘n-tuck, but strokes his piece of pig-iron, once, twice, like he's actually considering it. Then he turns around, and the sumbitch winks.

When he ambles into the room--no hurry, just take your time, you cocky pissant bastard--he doesn't tuck himself in even then, just lets it dangle down the denim. It's too fat and heavy to jump around as he walks; it just sorta sways from side to side, like a hypnotist's pocket-watch, and Diamond's unwillingly transfixed, thinking for some fucking reason of a song he heard once. _He wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel…_

As he squeezes past, the head of his dick brushes against Diamond's thigh, and leaves a tiny, glistening spot.

Some kinda fucking pervert, he thinks. Must be. Some kinda fucking queer.

His heart's clenching, the anxiety he gets before a perf, this time with no bracing hand to ease him. He thinks of tall, tall girls with tight, bouncy tits, the kind he's fucked in motels like this the country over, but that only deepens his muddle.

Whatever's going on--whatever happens in there--he'll put it down to the Codeine he's started on now he’s not driving and forget about it, and the kid, when they hit Texas tomorrow. He'll drive his damn self to Texas, one-armed and sleepless, if that's what it takes.

The room’s crummy, old-fashioned and not in a good way; small, but cluttered with wood-panelled closets and cupboards, intruding walls and blind corners that give Diamond the anxious notion of innumerable secret recesses. It is lit by a bare bulb hanging from a wire and standing lamps that cast only shadows. At the back there’s a mirror and sink where a tiny tiled patch of surplus bathroom spills out a waterstained door. Directly opposite the toilet-shower cubicle is a table with one chair, as if the architect thought it was important one guest be able eat their breakfast while watching the other take a shit. There are two trophy heads mounted over the beds, an elk and a bear, which between them take up at least fifty percent of the space in the room. The place has a soft buttery light that is claustrophobic rather than comforting.

The kid’s restless, rustling with too damn much energy for someone who was nearly asleep at the wheel ten minutes ago, though he at least sees fit to zip his pants up, finally. Diamond, for his part, has just hawked half a bottle of pills and is ready to say goodnight to pain and consciousness (which are one and the same thing to him now and for the foreseeable future) for at least twelve hours.

Slayton had jumped on the bear bed, the one nearest the door. When Diamond can just feel himself unravelling into sleep, he chirps, ‘Wanna see somethin?’

Diamond gives him a look he learnt from his mother. ‘Already seen it.’

The kid yaps out a dopey laugh that sends a bright flare of irritation against the welcome fog already rolling over him. ‘Not that. Here--gimme that dollar.’

‘What dollar?’

‘That big shiny coin I seen you kissin on t.v.’

‘This look like a welfare office?’

The kid twirls his eyes. ‘No, numbnuts—wanna show you somethin.’

Diamond's still suspicious, but, curiosity aroused, in spite of himself, he pulls the silver dollar, his lucky one, out of his left ass pocket, and throws it on the bed between Slayton’s splayed legs.

The shit smirks and squeezes his crotch before his hand slips down to pick it up. He holds it up to the acid light of the overhead bulb, and Diamond has a far-out moment where it’s the whole goddamn moon he’s got twinkling between thumb and forefinger.

Then he takes it in both paws and sort of twists it. The kid’s biceps bulge beneath the flannel of his shirt, and he rips the fucking coin in half like it’s cardboard. He tosses the two pieces in his hand, and then at Diamond, who reflexively bats them away with his good arm. They vanish into the carpet with two tiny, distinct thuds.

Diamond stares at the spot where they fell. ‘That was my lucky dollar,’ he says numbly.

‘Guess your luck just run out.’

He looks up, and Slayton makes a kind of a face, like...

Like he was a bull that just bucked Diamond out of the ring.

Like he just bust a hot sloppy load all over Diamond’s face.

Like he thinks he just proved something.

Then he swaggers off to the shower, not looking back.

Under normal circumstances Diamond would already be swinging, but he’s too damn hurt and too damn tired and the boy is too damn big, and apparently has the strength to go with it. He remembers watching Popeye for the first time as a kid, seeing how he was short but still beat the baddies and got his girl ( _dark and tall, so much taller than him_ ) and feeling a rush of hope that if he couldn’t be big he could at least be strong like Popeye. His mother had used it as a ploy to get him to eat spinach, and it had worked for all of one week, until he’d got into a fight with one of his regular bullies, and found after all he was about as tough as a single wilted spinach leaf. That was probably the first time he truly hated her.

He's really not sure what the point of that little display was, beyond more dick-tugging he's too sleepy and sore and short to be anywhere near in the mood for. He's going to bed.

Slayton comes out of the bathroom with his hair dripping like caramel down the red flush of his neck, and a towel round his waist. Diamond had slipped about a half hour of stupefied bliss before being awakened by Slayton’s noisy re-entry.

Slayton sits on the bed with the towel under his butt and switches the tv on. The long pink and white spear of his cock springs up from between his huge thighs like the handbrake of a car, and stays there, so rigid Diamond can almost feel it, but also flexing every so often, like a challenge or an invitation.

But the kid never glances over. Instead he watches a porno on the boxy wall-mounted t.v., the volume turned all the way up, and jacks off, showy and obnoxious.

The more looks Diamond takes the bigger it seems to get, until he’s sure it must be the meds messing with him, there’s no way even a half-Cyclops is fuelling that much tool without passing out every time he gets a stiffy. When he finally tears his eyes onto the screen, it’s some big blond ape railing a dark-haired midget.

He doesn’t even have the energy to know what to make of this. To try to work out what this kid’s deal is, what the fuck Bitts was thinking setting Diamond up with him.

Just turn that freaky shit off and go the fuck to sleep, he wants to say. Jesus everlovin Christ the fuck is wrong with you? But he's sleepy and horny and confused; the long day being rattled around in that deathtrap has caught all the way up to him. He feels like he’s been riding that bull again.

In the end sleep beats down everything else, and he plummets through the sex moans and jerk-off noises into a confused dream of a world where bulls ride cowboys.

When he wakes, his boxers are around his knees and someone is on top of him, squatting on his belly like a sleep paralysis demon. But much bigger.

‘You believe in karma, Diamond?’

His temples are a vice on his brain and his vision’s worse than when he’s drunk. After a few seconds he realises that part of why everything’s so dim and blurred is that the lights are off. The t.v. is still on.

He claps a hand to his forehead and beats at it, trying to drum out the pounding in his head. He doesn’t want to be awake, because then it’ll start hurting again, but the adrenalin pumping through his system doesn’t give him a choice. His pants are around his knees and there’s a man on top of him with his dick out. A man who seems to think he knows something about him.

‘If you're gonna rape me, spare me the sermon beforehand.’

‘No. You save the preaching for after, dontcha,’ Slayton says, and it’s his tone as much as his words that tell him. His realisation must be readable in his face, because Slayton gives him a grin—an ugly one, for all his pretty perfect teeth. ‘Londa has a few half-brothers of her own. Different fathers.’

 _You don’t fuckin say_. ‘Was yours Bigfoot?’

Slayton smiles again, white enamel rotting into rainbows in the garish multicoloured light of the t.v. that’s apparently still playing porn, if the sounds filling the room are anything to go by. If it was obnoxious before, now it’s disturbing. Fake-rape has never sounded so uncannily like the real thing.

‘Pake set me up.’ Two-timing motherfucking Bible-thumping holy booger. If Diamond sees him again he’ll thump a Bible up the hole the sun don’t shine out of.

‘You thought he was gonna let you get off, just like that? A bit of drippin in your ear bout Jesus?’

‘I thought—’ Diamond doesn’t know what he thought, and never will, because Slayton flops forward, and so does his dick. It's so heavy it kind of leans out from his body like a banana. Up close, unleashed, it’s like a fleshy black hole, a pulsing centre of gravity, sucking his eyes toward it. Diamond inhales involuntarily and almost forgets where he is and who the megaschlong waving in his face belongs to.

Almost. The prospect of that monstrosity being inserted in any of his orifices is an apocalyptic one, and panic forces him to speak through the pounding of his head and the desert dryness of his mouth. ‘You don’t—look. If it’s money you want, you can have what I got, which is near nothin. You wanna beat up an injured man, I can’t stop you. Just—please don’t break anything. I’ve got a living, man.’

‘Know why I asked? To do this, I mean. Not every man could, though I bet more of em want to than let on.’

The words strike like lightning and at once Diamond is afire with incoherent rage. _Fuck you, I ain’t no bitch! Fuckin neanderthal sons of bitches think just because a man’s small and ain’t got a face like the back end of a dog he wants to take it up the ass! Fuck you and the whole brickheaded cockscratchin lot a you! Fuck you all to hell and rot there!_

‘No, and I don't goddamn want to,’ is what he says, though he knows he’ll have to hear it anyway, like the hero of every fucking movie.

Slayton has seen the same movies, and indeed answers regardless. ‘Seen you ridin.’

The plum-purple head of his cock is less than an inch from the tip of Diamond's nose. He can practically taste the precome.

‘Little bitty piece like you, I thought, sure couldn't be more'n a hundred pounds, riding two thousand pounds a animal. And you always pick the big ones, dontcha.’ He fists his cock in a meaning motion. A little more prefuck pulses out—though it’s not really a _little;_ it’s more juice than Diamond can wring out of his balls at the end of some nights—and splashes across his nose, mouth and chin. Slayton’s eyes flash in the dark.

Pain and grogginess and terror make Diamond’s voice softer than he means it to be. ‘Slayton, listen. You wanna do this right, like men, call me up in a couple months and I promise I’ll be there. It don’t have to be this way. This is dirty—trust me, you don’t want to do it.’ But on that Diamond does not even trust himself.

‘Never forget when I first saw it. That tight little tush bouncing up and down like you knew goddamn well what. You got me fuckin bonin the buckle of my bluejeans, and I tell ya, that ain't too comfortable. Specially when you got a bull to mount. But you like that, dontcha?’

Before he can even begin to formulate a response, Slayton lifts off him, and Diamond’s chest heaves in relief. Short-lived, because the next second Slayton is falling on him, body to body, lying all along him and holding him fast. He dry-mounts him, cockhead punching like a fist into his crotch and thighs, his whole body slamming into Diamond’s in a simulation of sex so violent it feels like the real thing.

‘Yeah, you fuckin like that. Faggot whore.’

Diamond’s legs are trapped between Slayton’s, his right arm trapped in Slayton’s left hand, Slayton’s cock a pillar of fire against his belly, and his face too close to Diamond’s. Even his fucking nose is bigger.

Diamond tries to ignore both the jarring of his bones and the perverse arousal gathering in his loins, tries to treat him like one of those big humpy dogs he always hated so much as a little kid. _Down, down, boy. Urgh, Mommy why is his wiener like that? Oh, no—down, bad doggy._ ‘Slayton, my system's so full of shit I can’t hardly hear you, let alone know what the fuck you’re talking about. Please just go back to bed, and I’ll talk to you in the morning.’

Slayton has the bluest eyes Diamond has ever seen, blue as Wyoming skies, except the skies Diamond can read. His gaze is direct, but also somehow distant, as if entranced by something in Diamond’s face that doesn’t show up in the mirror. ‘Can’t lie to me, baby-boy. Seen that look on you.’

 _Fuckin cocksucker._ Since he can’t move any other part of him Diamond tosses his head over to stare at the wall, jaw clenched.

Slayton lets out a kind of soft laugh at this, an oddly grown-up sound. Even the warm air that gusts over Diamond's cheek feels wrong, too intimate.

‘Know what I thought when I saw your name up in lights?’

Diamond says nothing, looks murder at the tie-dye wallpaper.

‘ _Diamond_ —that there's a stripper name. ‘Swhat I thought. Or a whore name.’

‘Got a brother called Pearl.’ Why the fuck did he say that? High as a fucking kite on Codeine’s why, must be. He shouldn’t have mentioned his brother.

‘He a sissy little piece a cock candy like you?’

 _He’s thirteen, you fucker_. ‘Shut up. You just—just shut your fucking—’

Diamond abruptly stops humping and swings up on his forearms like an ape, buttocks landing on Diamond’s pecs. It’s like being sat on by an elephant. And the trunk is right at his mouth. ‘How bout you open your fucking? Yeah, that's it, babe, open up for Daddy's dick.’

Diamond opens his mouth to tell Daddy exactly where he can stick his dick. An elementary error, because the next minute it’s bulging out the side of his face.

Diamond’s eyes must be cartoonishly wide; he emits an incoherent splutter of protest and pushes feebly at Slayton’s ice-tray abdomen. Slayton, in the gentlest move he’s made so far, takes the hand and puts it on the top of Diamond’s head with his own hand on top of it. He uses Diamond’s own hand to force him down on his dick. It’s like a sense-memory of the games the bigger boys in the kindergarten (which was all of them) used to play. _Hey, idiot, why are you hitting yourself?_ At least then it was just hitting.

The bell-curve hits the back of his throat, rams past his tonsils and surely it’d have to bend almost in half to go any further, at this angle. But instead it feels like it’s Diamond’s throat that bends, stretching like rubber around the reinforced concrete of Slayton’s cock. It’s so, so fat and full in his throat, and Slayton isn’t giving him any time to adjust. Anything higher than his bellybutton is currently out of the range of Diamond’s vision, but from what he can hear Slayton is lost in his own ecstasy, making little turned-on noises and occasional hisses when Diamond’s teeth catch on cockflesh.

Diamond tries to pull his hand away, and Slayton lets it go, finding it easier to grip Diamond's head like a football and fuck in, using his ears for reins.

The boy bouncing on his chest is so heavy he can almost hear his breastbone screaming under the strain. But they say every stormcloud has a silver lining--his right hand is free.

Without even really thinking about what he’s doing he balls it into a fist and aims two low punches below Slayton’s ribcage, quick as snakestrikes, not enough to incapacitate, but should at least knock the fucker off kilter.

Slayton takes the first without so much as a grunt and catches the second easily. He laughs. ‘You wanna fight me, big boy? Try it. I’ll split your skull then fuck your corpse.’

He stops thrusting and slams Diamond’s wrist up on the headboard. ‘Now, I know I don’t have to tell you about teeth.’

And with that Slayton hitches up his pelvis and starts face-fucking him in earnest.

Slayton doesn’t have to worry about biting; there isn’t any room to. His dick is so stupid fucking huge barely any air can flow in around it, and what little does seems to get fucked right out again, with sputtering sounds that are more obscene than anything coming from the t.v.

A little guy with a big mouth, more than one teacher called him, and for once he’s thankful for the second part, since it’s the only way he’s surviving this. That, and breathing through his nose, are the only things keeping him alive. Once again, it's less like a prelude to the main perf than a rehearsal: the slap of hips on cheeks, the panicky intrusive feeling of too big too hard too. Damn. Deep.

After the initial resistance the last many inches slide in buttery-smooth, and Diamond’s nose is rammed so hard into Slayton’s navel he’s worried it’ll break. Then he registers just how far down Slayton’s dick is, and worries instead it’s about to perforate his lung. He can’t help gagging, can’t help swallowing around the hot steel pipe lodged in his throat, over and over, telling himself _through the nose, you idiot,_ but unable to stop himself, anymore than he can stop the tears flowing freely down his face. His brain feels like it’s starting to wisp out the pores in his scalp as his throat keeps on flexing, trying desperately to eject the foreign object. Then Slayton’s cock twitches back and there’s a gush of wetness and great, if he doesn’t suffocate he can drown.

Slayton groans and grinds against his face, smushing his nose deeper into his groin, holding it there as he comes, so far inside him he can’t taste it.

Finally, _finally,_ after he’s dumped what must be the longest load Diamond’s ever heard of straight into his stomach, he starts to sit back, and the snake slides out of the hole.

Diamond coughs, chokes, splutters, spits the damn thing out and slobber all over the floral duvet. He hacks the air for breath, and when he gets it says, ‘Well now this is real Christian, ain't it? Did Pake—’

Slayton hits him on his raw right cheek, the blow piledriving pain into his shoulder and side, and he almost vomits.

‘Shut up. He didn't--he doesn't know about this. He just thinks I'm gonna teach you a lesson. Which I am. You better believe I am. I guarantee you won’t ever forget it.’ The hayseed act is long forgotten, the hint of hick accent faded like a bad memory. This is no redneck rodeo bum. He goes to college. Maybe even the one Diamond’s mother had picked out for him before he got on the back of that bull.

He hasn’t gone down _at all._ If anything, his prick looks harder, spit-polished and gleaming, as if all that heavy load had been weighing it down.

‘You best get back on that dick, bitch.’

‘I swear, I can’t, not again. I’ll fuckin asphyxiate, and that's the fuckin truth, I swear.’

Slayton breathes heavy for a moment, looking like that may be a risk he’s willing to run.

‘Well, then,’ he says at last. He stands and flips Diamond over. He throws him around so easy, like he _is_ made of cotton candy. Diamond falls on his front with his taped-up arm under him, and the saggy motel mattress might as well be the dirt floor of an arena for the softness of his landing. Jesus Christ, he wants to die.

Slayton climbs on board, layering himself over Diamond’s back, his weight plunging him deeper into the mattress, until he’s half-swallowed by it. With his balls between Diamond’s thighs his head is spitting prefuck into the small of his back, and the shaft itself is so fat it sinks down by the inertia of its own weight to nestle in the sweat-slicked chasm of his ass, his cheeks splitting like the Red Sea for Moses’s staff. There is no way this is happening, not without killing him, and Diamond finds that after all he isn’t ready to go yet. Not like this. He’s never made a tally of undignified deaths, but bleeding out on some college boy’s mutant cock has got to be up there.

Then again, a resigned, dispassionate voice reminds him, he’s taken bigger, and lived. Just nearly.

‘Oh God, no, please, I ain’t never done anything like this, man’, he says, a lie, a lie, a goddamned lie, like motel-room rape is just a statistic, and Slayton mumble-sings a line from an old Western ballad as he teases his cock up and down Diamonds crack. ‘ _Twenty-three years old and never been rode_ …’

His voice is right above Diamonds head, and Diamond can feel the vibrations in his skull. Or maybe that’s just the terror. ‘I’m serious, man, I—’

‘Oh, suck it up, _man_. What exactly do you think you're doing in the ring all those nights?’

Diamond is briefly lost for words, staggered at just how twisted this puppy is. It’s like he sees the world—or at least the part that has Diamond in it--through spectacles made out of funhouse mirrors. ‘Not this, you freak.’

‘Not for every cowboy, no. Not for most of em. But for you, you half-pint slut—fuck yeah, this is what it is. This is all it ever was.’

Diamond is so enraged this, at what amounts to an assault on his whole existence, broken limbs and bruises are lost in the white-out flood of fury. He's ready to throw the back of his head into Slayton’s chin, and if his skull splits Slayton can fuck his corpse till Kingdom come. As if he can sense what Diamond’s thinking, Slayton puts pressure--probably not even all that much--on Diamond's left shoulder, and the world shutters.

When his eyes open again, the porno’s still going, and it turns out it wasn’t on max volume because it’s at least twice as loud as before. Or is that his head. Jesus, his head is doing things that don’t even classify as hurt anymore. On top of that Slayton has the radio playing, and Diamond is relieved he can’t hear himself bawling like he hasn’t since the man who was never his father left in a screech of dust.

When he looks behind, Slayton is kneeling over his thighs. He flashes a grin, and spins Diamond’s boxers round his finger. His cock bobs where it’s still jutting out, stiff as ever, from between his thighs, and he rubs the boxers over it, massaging the thinning blue cotton over its sticky head.

Somehow even this feels like a violation. ‘Sunavabitch. Give those back.’

‘Okay, but I’ll come in em first. Come all fuckin over em and make you wear em all wet,’ Slayton says, or rather mouths, because Diamond can’t really hear anything but unremitting, excruciating noise.

‘Too loud,’ he slurs.

Slayton leans over him, putting a knee up on Diamond’s right buttcheek and pummelling it a little. His breath smells like strawberry and the elastic waistband of the boxers, still hanging off his dick, scratches Diamond’s spine. ‘Don’t need to scare the neighbours, do we, darling? Cause I got a feeling you’re a screamer.’

Diamond smothers his face in the pillow. If he felt exposed before, this is infinitely worse. He’s now completely naked, except, he realises when he lifts his head and peers down at his chest, that a star-spangled bandana has been lovingly tied around his neck. Where and how in hell did this kid get _that?_ And how many times has he jerked off with it, cause it feels kinda crusty. And that’s not all that make his skin crawl. He doesn’t want that kind of luck hanging around his neck.

He shivers at the hands sliding up his neck, but isn’t expecting it when Slayton twists the ends of the bandanna like a mafioso’s piano wire, yanks until the breath stalls in his throat and the blue stars are dancing before Diamond’s blackening vision. All at once the staticky noise dies down, there’s a screeching metallic boom, and the man on the radio says, ‘Well folks, this pretty little piece we got here is twenty-three-year-old Diamond Felts, from Redsled, Wyoming. Five-foot three, one hunnerd thirty pounds, he’s a gonna ride Slayton Bigdick from Bumfuck, Oklahoma, and you best believe that’s what’s about to happen. Folks, this feller is fifteen inches long, he is a big, _big_ boy, and widdle Diamond Felts is wonderin if he’s ever gonna see sunshine again. Amen and God bless Merka.’

Something flashes through the dimness before his eyes. For all he knows it was his life. Then he’s back in the ring for the first time, Kisses waiting in red-eyed rage, and Leecil’s stupid hick voice is saying, ‘You are goin a git tore up.’

Slayton lets the neckerchief slip slack just as Diamond’s thinking he’s either changed his mind about fucking him or has decided to go for a murder-rape, and in that order. He lets out a wheezing gasp, and the kid chuckles, distorted and diabolical through the static in his brain. He backhands Diamond the Wyo way, right across both buttcheeks, and the sting and sound wake Diamond up to what is about to happen in literally seconds if he doesn’t do something, do anything.

He feels like Atlas shrugging off the world, but he manages to roll away, onto his back, the weight on his castbound arm relieved. Slayton chases after, arm raised, eyes flashing fury, but Diamond puts out a pleading hand. ‘Slayton, listen, Slayton, please, I’ll do it, I'll suck your dick I'll lick your balls your feet your ass whatever the fuck you want, please, man, please please—’ Diamond lists off everything he's ever paid or made a woman do to him, and then some shit he's only fantasized about.

Slayton appears half aroused, half disgusted by this performance. ‘You drink my piss?’ He puts his knee on Diamond again, this time on his bad shoulder, and leans on it, just a little, but enough, enough to feel like it’s dislocating all over again. His dick is waggling in Diamond’s face, but he’s in so much pain he can’t even think about that. He just wants it stop hurting.

‘Oh fuck— _ahhhhh_! Yes, man, if you want, _please_.’

The room is vibrating so much it’s hard to keep Slayton in focus, biggest thing in it though he is. The air is kind of buzzy, like it’s one of those Van Gogh paintings come to schizophrenic life.

‘Just let me do it this time. Please. I promise it’ll be the best head you ever had.’

Slayton scoffs, but can’t hide a pleased flush. Freaky as he is, his face isn’t a hard one to read. The opposite, in fact. He looks excited. He takes his knee off Diamond's shoulder.

The room settles somewhat, and the panic recedes, and it is then, in a hideous burst of insight, that the thought comes to Diamond that this kid probably never had his dick so much as breathed on before tonight, was probably ( _holy shit_ ) a virgin. And that thought, that and the clearwater blueness of his eyes, the slight snubness of his nose; the furrowed concentration in his brow and the faint speckling of freckles over his cheekbones—surely even they shouldn’t be able to make him look innocent given what he’s done, is doing, and means to. Yet they do. If Diamond had passed this kid in the street he’d never in a million years have marked him out for this kind of scene. He can’t even begin to figure how he’s supposed to feel about any of it. It’s like one long nightmare. But he can’t seem to pinch himself hard enough to wake up.

‘Go ahead, faggot. Make my fuckin night.’

Diamond’s never actually given a blowjob before--not willingly, at least--but he’s received enough of them that he reckons he’s got the basic idea.

He sits up, too fast and almost falls on his face but flings out a hand and hits the wall. Christ, it’s like being drunk but nowhere near as fun. Like those sour mornings-after when you’re still half-wasted but also hungover. There’s an exhalation from on high, and the wall kind of flexes under his fingers. After a bleary beat he realises he’s supporting himself on Slayton’s abs.

He slides his hand down the sparse golden treasure trail to where the cock is waiting like the dragon at the end of a tale, red and ravenous. Well, this is it. He leans in, draws an involuntary breath and almost gags on the ripe, heady scent rolling off it. He’s softly stunned, now he has time to really take it in. With Slayton’s dick right in his face he can barely see either side of it, it’s so wide. How the hell did it even fit in his mouth? Well, what matters is that it _did_ fit, which means this is actually doable, despite what appearances and the laws of physics would suggest. Best not to over-analyse, and just do.

So he doesn’t think about the smell, the warmth, the silky stiffness, the texture of the veins and the slick plumpness of the head, the heft and burst of wet when he takes it into his mouth. He doesn’t think about the flavour, salty, but also kind of smoky, almost like barbeque. He doesn’t think about any of it. He’s got a job to do.

He strokes the shaft with his free hand, reasoning the more length he can cover that way the less he has to take down his œsophagus. But Slayton soon catches on to this tactic and knocks his hand away, gripping the top of Diamond’s head like before, this time one-handed like a baseball. Jesus he has big hands. All the fables are proving true tonight.

Diamond redeploys his hand to stroke Slayton’s sack, rolling his nuts between his fingers, lightly squishing them like gnarly stress balls. Being eighteen and all, his nads are basically hairless and his bush is more of a well-mown lawn. In other words—ones Diamond could never bring himself to say, can barely allow himself to think—blowing him, aside from the very real risk of suffocation, isn’t at all unpleasant, and Diamond doesn’t like that because you’re not supposed to enjoy your rape. Apparently nobody told his dick that.

He squeezes his erection (which had never seemed in any wise inadequate before, but now feels kind of pitiful, infinitely unworthy to stand in the presence of the tyrant sceptre throbbing between his lips) between his thighs to try to hide it. Unfortunately the movement attracts Slayton’s attention.

‘Holy shit, you hard? You fuckin hard, bro? From sucking my cock? _Je-sus._ ’

He has a way of taking the Saviour’s name in vain that’s particularly galling, for reasons that have nothing to go with blasphemy. It’s the way he makes Diamond feel as if _he_ were the fucked-up one.

_Don’t think. Get it over with._

He throats Slayton until he chokes, pulls back, suck, swirl and repeat and when it’s only spunk that comes out he’s so relieved he could faint again. So thankful he swallows it down without even being told, and then carefully cleans Slayton’s dick, polishing every fold and ridge with his tongue, flicking his tongue into the dilated piss-slit, under the uncut foreskin.

Slayton looks actually appalled, the fact that he’s still blurting out fat dribbles of sperm notwithstanding. ‘Jesus _Christ_ , you’re a faggot. _Never done this before, man_ —what a load of horseshit. Do I even wanna know how many times you’ve done this? Bet you were fuckin born with a cock in your mouth.’

There is nothing at all Diamond can say to this, so he keeps suckling, hoping he can tease out another orgasm this way, hoping against reason to delay the inevitable. His whole face feels hot and tingly, and both his legs have gone to sleep from the way he’s kneeling on them. When is this fucking night gonna be done?

Slayton’s mind seems to be running along the same track, because he wrenches Diamond off his cock, as if suddenly sickened by what he’s doing. If up till then everything had been happening in a kind of sadistic slow-motion, now time seems to gather momentum, the flow of events cascading toward terminal velocity.

Without remembering precisely how, Diamond finds himself once more face-down on the bed, his pain-wracked, drug-weakened frame no longer able to offer even token resistance. What’s gonna happen is gonna happen. He just hopes he’s alive at the end of it.

There is the weight of Slayton’s body falling over his, and the weight of his cock pressing into Diamond’s hole and there is the weight around his heart that eclipses both.

Slayton is still, still, _still_ fucking hard as rebar, because apparently two earth-shattering orgasms were just foreplay, because he’s eighteen and about to lose his v-card to his t.v. crush, because he’s about to wreck the fucking shit out of Diamond’s unwilling ass, and men and women can say what they want, but both know deep down rape is the hottest kind of sex.

Diamond makes an abortive lunge up the bed—he isn’t even consciously trying to get away, it’s his lizardbrain making one last bid for survival, but it makes no difference either way, Slayton reigns him in with a hand on each shoulder, the right grip merely firm, the left like one of those claws they use to crush junk cars. He puts Diamond just where he wants him and holds him there, as easy as a rancher holding a calf on the cutting table. ‘Easy, cowboy. No turning outta this rodeo.’

‘Slayton, please—’

‘Long time you been riding for a fall. Now you’re gonna get it.’

He thrusts forward, and his dick skids down Diamond’s taint, prods the tight walnut of his sack, his cockhead the size of Diamond’s two balls put together. He lets go of Diamond’s shoulders, long enough to do a little course correction, and holds himself on-target as he moves in again. He’s not good at it, doesn’t know about stretching, doesn’t know about lube (wouldn’t use it if he did), doesn’t know about work it in gently then hold your horse until the girl says go. As far as he’s concerned it’s just a matter of applying enough pressure, like Diamond’s sphincter is bubble-wrap and his prick is one big pin.

His cock presses in, then slips up like a ricocheting bullet. Slayton swears under his breath and mutters something like, _c’mon, just fuckin go in_. Diamond’s druggy stupor has worn off at the worst time and he’s hyper-aware of everything, from the sweat prickling all over his skin, to the slightly sour aftertaste of come in his mouth, to the fact that he somehow still has a hard-on.

‘Man, I told you it ain’t gonna fit—’

‘Shut up.’ How the hell can he sound so nonchalant, so _normal_?

Once more he jams himself against Diamond’s hole, and Diamond just knows the third time’ll be the kicker. ‘Any last words?’

‘I said it ain’t gonna fit, fuckhead.’

‘Inspiring.’

‘Christ, just get it over with, you bastard.’

Slayton snorts, and shoves forward, not just his cock, but his whole body, and Diamond is flattened like an Axis city at the end of World War Two. For a moment there’s a sensation of unbelievable pressure as something like an atomic warhead buckles in his cornhole, but only for a moment. In the end it’s just physics—unstoppable force meets a highly malleable orifice. In Diamond’s head there’s an audible pop, but that was probably his mind going.

‘It hurts,’ he breathes, even after everything staggered by just how much _._ ‘ _Hurts_.’

‘It’s supposed to.’

Slayton rocks forward, a powerful roll of his pelvis that lances several inches of impossibly thick cock into Diamond’s screaming flesh. The bull is in the chute.

‘God.’ And his voice trembles, as if with awe. ‘God, you’re so fuckin _little_.’ He rolls in more, and this time doesn’t stop.

Diamond hasn’t got a voice anymore—dried clean up, shrivelled along with his prick, but he is shaking, shaking all over like he’s got a fever, like he’s got the convulsions his never-named, barely-born older sister died of. Every way he moves there’s only more of Slayton: Slayton’s arms, Slayton’s legs, Slayton’s belly on his back, Slayton’s chest on his shoulders, his bubblegum breath on his hair and his hot-steel hardness in his guts, so far in Diamond doesn’t dare open his mouth for fear it’ll pop out between his teeth. He once had a partner who had a little blow-up doll he carried around in his pocket. About the size of a two-year-old when inflated, nasty sumbitch, with a little plaid schoolgirl skirt. He reckons that’s what this must look like. Fifteen inches. Jesus. If there was a time to lay his life at the foot of the Cross this is it, because he’s got the whole damn tree planted up his ass. He almost wishes he _were_ back on the bull.

Slayton starts to move, and the shaking doesn’t stop. He’s never had it this bad. Not when dad left, not when baby Pearl got the electric drill out of the garage and drilled through his own bellybutton while their mother was in Denver for a staff training course. Not when he was fourteen and big Pisskettle Draves who lived on a dirt-road ranch lifted him off his feet and put him up against the back of the gym shed and ripped his jeans off. Or when Carotine Orth the school’s star athlete had come out of the gym shed holding his dick in one hand and a baseball bat in the other and saying one of these is going up your ass. In the end they both had and Slayton had been in an out-of-state hospital for a month but that was all in the past all over and done. Or so he’d thought.

 _It'll be okay_ , he whispers inside his head, lying to himself because sometimes that’s what you gotta do. He just has to ride this out.

When he pulls out, it feels like he takes Diamond’s entire intestinal tract with him. When he slams in again Diamond is shoved forward several inches, and so is the bed, hitting the wall with a bang that’s surely gotta bring the owners down on them.

In fact, what it brings down is the incongruous elk’s head, which slips free from the wall and lands in front of Diamonds face. If he'd been taller it would have taken him out, possibly killed him—the varnished shield it’s mounted on has a wicked point. Its eyes are two different colours, one brown like a knot in wood, the other green as a poisoned river. He didn’t know you could get elks with green eyes. It gives him the absolute creeps.

‘Know what’s fucked up?’ Slayton says, picking up speed.

‘Everything about this is fucked up,’ Diamond gasps out.

‘I woulda done this anyway. But not like this—sweet ‘n nice—I can be that, if I wanna. Shit, you vicious little bastard, I woulda courted you, treated you like a fuckin princess. I woulda laid you down on this bed and ate you out till you were howlin for it. And you woulda. I know you woulda. But you had to fuckin ruin it by being a rapist piece of shit.’

Something inside Diamond does a horrible little flip at this. But it’s also the first inkling he’s had of something he can use, some kind of leverage to get this load off his ass.

‘It don’t have to be this way,’ he says, echo of himself. ‘We can—we can still—ah, mother _fuck._ Slayton, you can just—'

What? Spoon on the bed? Call him pretty names instead of ugly ones? Wait until Diamond’s ready to take a quarter of his height in cock, which will be about when they open a ski resort in hell and Diamond gives up rodeo and crawls back to Redsled to be a sales clerk in his mother’s store. None of that would change what this is. At this point he’s just bargaining for a longer rope.

Slayton comes to a dead stop, somewhere north of his navel. He doesn’t speak for a while, but when he does it’s with a cold fury that makes Diamond shrivel around his prick. ‘How dumb do you think I am, bitch?’

‘I wasn’t, I mean, I didn’t—’

‘That horse bolted long ago. You an outlaw, Diamond. And I’m gonna break you in.’

Slayton mounts him high and rides him hard, insatiate cock grinding viciously into his guts, like this fucking evil bastard is trying to rupture him in as many places as possible. The song on the radio is something ghetto, something rappy and rapey, the words indecipherable but the beat infectious and violent and erotic in a primal, animalistic way. Slayton hums and mumbles along, hips snapping, hands slapping in time. The noise bleeds into him, penetrates him mind and body, as if his violation has torn down all barriers between him and the outside. He must be bleeding as well, because there’s a wetness around his hole that most definitely wasn’t there when Slayton forced himself in.

‘ _Bam, bam_.’ The bass drops and Slayton knocks his head from side to side with blows that set his teeth rattling inside his skull, then stuffs it into the mattress so forcefully it’s like he’s trying to push it through to the other side.

Each thrust penetrates deeper, splits him wider. Every time he thinks he’s reached the peak of the agony, there’s another, and another, and another. He doesn’t know how much time is passing, keeps slipping in and out of consciousness as Slayton keeps shoving in and out of his ass. At some point he wakes and the t.v. and radio are off. Slayton evidently believes he’ll keep quiet.

The pain has dulled now, but there’s still the awful, inescapable awareness of the _thing_ inside him, the relentless violence being done to his inward parts, the certainty that something’s got to give and soon. He has never felt so small in all his life. And that’s not saying something: it’s saying everything there is to.

‘Say you’re sorry.’

The command seems to come from very far away, maybe heaven, the place where the Sadist in the Sky pulled out Diamond’s file, stencilled in SEX: Male, HEIGHT: 5’3”, DESTINY: Whore, and laughed till there was thunder over Wyoming.

Diamond has never willingly apologised for anything in his life.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so fuckin sorry, please, Slayton, please, please, _please_ —’

And he is. He’s sorry he ever touched Myron’s wife, sorry he ever spoke to her, ever saw her, sorry he ever set foot in the Bewd’s corral, sorry his mother didn’t squeeze him out into the hottest of the hot springs and let him scald to death in his own birthblood. He’s _so_ sorry.

Slayton has his paws planted on either side the elk head, fucking so fast the thrusts no longer make distinct sounds, just a continuous _slapslapslap_ like one of those fancy Italian bakers pounding dough. His passage feels loose and slick, the ring of muscle so brutalised he can’t even clench it, but now there’s something else, some upper limit Slayton has yet to push through, an inner wall Slayton is battering against.

It can’t. He can’t go any further. There’s no way— ‘That’s it, right. You’re all the way in, now? Tell me you’re all the way in.’

Slayton gives a gleeful snort, and a particularly savage thrust. ‘Not even close, sweetcheeks. Feel it. Put your hand back there and feel it, babe.’

Diamond doesn’t want to feel it, doesn’t want to find out. He thought Slayton was all the way in, as all as there was way in him. He doesn’t want to know otherwise, but Slayton makes him, takes his trembling hand in his larger hand, and wraps his fist around the part of Slayton’s dick that has yet to enter him, as far around it as his fingers will go, and there’s as much space on either side his pointer and his pinkie as there is between the tip of his index finger and his thumb.

He’d thought there was nothing more in him to give, but he feels something spasm and spring every time Slayton rams the head of his dick against it, and he comprehends that what he thought was a wall is more like a fence in his flesh, one that Slayton is bulldozing toward, means to bulldoze through.

‘Feel that, faggot? That’s your second hole. Your second cherry. Boy, if you thought it hurt when I popped the first one, you just wait for this. Cause I’m goin right on through. Gonna be like punching a hole in a cow’s ear.’

Is it possible to die from being fucked? Diamond is about to find out.

_It’s not just a question of pop it in and away you go. He could need surgery. There’s injured ligaments, internal bleeding, swelling, pain, could be some nerve or blood vessel damage._

With one bold stab Slayton breaks the barrier and something crooked inside him becomes horridly straight. And just like that it all goes away. It’s like Diamond has crested the wave of pain and panic and now he’s simply floating. There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. The worst has come.

So has Diamond, without even getting hard.

Diamond’s cheeks are warm against Slayton’s thighs, cold against the tear-soaked sheets. It feels like his whole body, from his hips to his heart, is clenched around Slayton’s dick. It’s weird because his conscious mind is filled with a cool white serenity even as his reptile brain is panicking, trying manically to figure out what the fuck is happening and where in the fucking cosmos his internal organs went, because they certainly aren’t anywhere in the vicinity of his lower body anymore. That real estate is occupied by Slayton’s evilly massive dong. But it doesn’t hurt. Or at least, he no longer remembers what it feels like not to hurt, and that amounts to the same thing.

Slayton reaches underneath Diamond and grabs his stomach, grabs his own length _through_ Diamonds body, and something in Diamond shrieks not from the pain but from the sheer horror of it, the irrevocability of how this man has destroyed him. But no sound comes from his mouth but a long sigh.

Slayton lets out a sigh of his own, then presses his mouth to Diamond’s neck, and his body is shuddering with pleasure as he mashes Diamond’s flesh around his cock, squeezing him like he really is a silicon sex doll. It takes a beat before Diamond realises he’s coming, flooding the wreckage of his innards with the sap of life.

Slayton collapses on top of him like a roof caving in, weighing Diamond down like the world’s unsafest comfort blanket. He ruts into Diamond’s ass in small, stuttering jerks and Diamond can feel him contracting and swelling in his guts. He comes for a _long_ time, and even as he twists out and levers off Diamond feels a few last shots splatter between his shoulderblades. One flies right over his head and hits the elk on the nose. The animal blinks his mismatched eyes, looking comically offended. Diamonds wants to laugh, but the first chuckle turns to a sob before it leaves his mouth.

While Diamond cries on the bed, Slayton gets up and turns the radio on again and there’s a few seconds of hip-hop trash before that galvanised voice is back, rattling through a hole at the back of Diamond’s head he thought he had well stopped-up.

_Take out your horns and saddle up, folks, this next one’s a short number called ‘The Ballad of Dainty Diamond Felts.’ Sweet little song, no more than five minutes and thirty seconds long, bout how this two-bit hustler done paid the wages a all a his sins._

When he closes his eyes the bright blood-clot patterns from the wallpaper play against his eyelids, bloom and grow and take on a hideous three-dimensionality. The big blobs swarm and penetrate the little ones, white flows into red, fleshy half-birthed things spasm and spread and die with cries of ecstasy and woe. Diamonds turn to dust. A green-eyed, gold-antlered demon stalks toward him, cock spouting fire. Terrified, Diamond forces his eyes open and Slayton is standing beside the bed, bottle of pills in one hand, bottle of water in the other.

‘Take them.’

‘Oh. Thanks.’ Feeling frangible as old glass, Diamond stretches out a hand.

‘All of them.’

Diamond freezes mid-reach. He’s never been one to pay much heed to doctor’s orders, but even he knows you can’t take that many prescription opioids in one go and expect any good of it.

Diamond stares up at Slayton’s face, and even though he blinks twice to make sure his eyes are open, he finds nothing human looking back at him. ‘I’ll die, man.’

‘Just what do you think I brought you here to do?’

Diamond feels his eyes bugging out, can smell the cold sweat pearling on his brow. He’s been disliked all his life. He’s been hated plenty. No one to his knowledge has ever wanted to kill him. He doubts even Myron wanted that. ‘I didn’t touch her even five minutes.’

‘It’s not that, you pisstain! It’s fuckin _you!_ I was in love with you, don’t you fuckin get it?’

Slayton’s cocky self-assurance is finally cracking. Breath coming all rough, high colour in his cheeks, body tensed in strained stillness, he looks like _he_ was the one who just got his guts shredded. And after all that’s happened this evening, _this_ is the most surreal moment of all, this cornhaired kid he met yesterday blaming him for—for what? Breaking his queer little heart through a tv set? In all his half a decade of riding, Diamond’s never been as spooked of a bull as he is of this crazy-ass boy. ‘You never even knew me,’ he whispers.

‘Yeah. That’s about it, ain’t it. God, what a fucked-up fuckin world you made.’

Anything Diamond once had to fall back on is gone: the outsized ego, the mile-wide chip on each shoulder; the defiance, the self-reliance, the persistence, the resistance—all fucked into a pulp and drowned in come. All that’s left is an inward voice as small as he is that says, please don’t hurt me anymore.

They stare at each other for the longest minute of Diamond’s life. Those goddamn blue eyes. Like those huge empty skies you look into and get the panicky untethered feeling of knowing there’s nothing between you and the cold black night of space but more space. Skies you could fall into and never hit bottom. He can’t make this kid out. One second he’s boring him a new back-hole, the next he ‘loves’ him, the next wants him dead? Is he psycho or what? What the hell is Diamond missing?

_You don’t get how it is for nobody but your own dee self._

It’s Slayton who blinks first. His eyes pinch shut and his jaw works like he’s chewing his own rage and swallowing it down one bitter piece at a time. Finally his shoulders sag, and his breath comes out in a shudder.

‘Fuck.’

He puts the water aside and tips the pill bottle into his hand—a good handful, but not enough to kill. Diamond sucks the little pastel polygons off his fingers, then kisses them in thanks, even as the dissolving-chemical taste makes him want to hurl. The water is offered to him next, and he gulps it down, wrapping his lips full around the neck of the bottle like it’s a dick.

The next thing in his mouth, an actual dick, is welcome to chase away the taste. The reason this blowjob is extra salty is because he’s drinking his own tears. As he sucks, Slayton strokes the shell of his ear, the line of his jaw, smooths away the sweat on his forehead. The softness of the fingertips on his skin is a maddening counterpoint to the brutal firmness of the prick bashing in his gullet.

‘Hey. Hey now. Hush, baby-boy, it’s okay. It’s okay.’

For some reason, the sudden sweetness in Slayton’s voice and touch only makes him sob harder. It’s always the kindness that kills him the most. When he was stumbling into the latter end of sixteen, and nurturing a sullen suspicion the growth spurt he’d heard so much about was as fantastical as Santa Claus and the myriad opportunities awaiting Redsled High graduates, but not yet awakened to the fact it wasn’t only his height that made eyes follow him through the halls, Lino Dunch had befriended him.

Six-foot-one, not the tallest giraffe in the zoo—that was Beanstalk Briant—but one of the biggest all-round. His dad owned most of the business in Redsled that weren’t state or national franchises, and he had sought Diamond out.

It had been the start of a school day. Diamond was taking the usual shit from a homo erectus too massive to deck but too bonebrained to do more than grunt ‘shorty’ and gurgle like a fluey hog, and Lino had come from behind and straightened out his crooked teeth on the keyhole of a locker. From there it progressed with dizzying rapidity to saying hello in breaks and between classes, actually laughing at Diamond’s vicious, sarcasm-in-lieu-of-a-school-shooting humour, hoisting him up into bone-jarring hugs that didn’t feel intentionally patronising, squeezing his shoulder and paying little compliments, delivered with casual sincerity, but to Diamond so novel they left him stunned and stammering each time. Everything that in hindsight Diamond could see as a kind of twisted wooing.

This whirlwind courtship of six weeks culminated in them going to see _Blue Horn._ The story of a minor Indian chief was an odd choice, given neither of them were much for history, but Diamond had been too giddy about finally climbing the school’s evolutionary ladder to think too hard about it. Or about why they were going at 2pm to a movie in its second week, why they were going to the Obel, which had been running down when Diamond’s parents were highschool lovers necking there, under the management of the same owner, Ma Cratchet, who was still too tight to hire ushers, or why none of Lino’s other friends had turned up. Yeah, hindsight was a cunt.

While Lino went to the bathroom Diamond bought popcorn and cokes, insisting on using his own money, since Lino had bought the tickets. They sat in the back left corner, darkyears away from the three other people in the theatre. They’d reached the first fuckscene (Indians raping a settler girl), Diamond was just starting to regret having worn his stiff new jeans and before the writhing upper torsos on the screen had faded to black Lino was lifting him into his lap.

Diamond felt his point almost instantly and tried to break free. With the martial arts and wrestling classes he’d thrown himself into after the gym shed incident he made a good go of it, too. But Lino was still roughly double his weight, and one unpulled punch to the side of the head made him limp as a throatslit lamb for the rest of the film.

Lino’s cock was already slick--must have lubed himself in the restroom--and it went in like a knife. Diamond was doing his best rattlesnake impression while Lino soothed him and kissed his ear, hair, cheeks, every part of Diamond’s face he could reach with his big slobbering mouth that stunk of cherry cola, all the while his ten-sizes-too-big dick was doing its best jackhammer impression in Diamond’s colon.

After a short ride to a sloppy finish, he didn’t pull out until he’d worked himself to full hardness again which, being he was a teenage boy, didn’t take long. Diamond tried to ignore the dick in his ass and focus on the movie, which was long and boring, and Lino didn’t pull out once, just rested semi-soft and sticky in Diamond’s ass between waves. By the time the credits were rolling Diamond’s dick was numb from coming, and his cheeks were tacky with dried tears. His neck felt like it looked like a chewtoy.

Lino eased him off and buckled him up, kissed his forehead and said how good he’d been. Diamond said nothing, saw nothing, staggered out into the light through a mist of tears. He limped where Lino pushed him and tried not to howl when he jostled his ass, which he did a lot and on purpose. Lino drove him home like a proper date, raped him again in the back seat while the car was sitting in his mother’s driveway, threw him out on the concrete and pissed in his face, and finally fucked him up against the front door, brass knocker bruising Diamond’s balls with each thrust (thank God there was no one home), leaving him with his ass dripping come onto the welcome mat. But the worst thing, the thing that, Diamond saw through the bitchly puce glow of hindsight, had needlemarked the cracks that were now splitting wide open, was that Lino had come back, wallet in hand, and stopped the dripping by stuffing four five-dollar bills up Diamond’s hole. Twenty dollars—less than the price of the tickets. And he’d put his arms around Diamond and said what a perfect date he’d been.

The day after, Lino cornered him in an empty bathroom at school, evidently figuring he'd got himself a running gig. Before he had his boner half out of his jeans, Diamond dropped him, and it, with a return plus interest for the uppercut in the theatre. He left Diamond alone after that, and so did all the other cool kids who’d started nodding at him or making non-contemptuous eye contact in the halls. Diamond didn’t know if he said anything—nobody said anything to _Diamond,_ but the looks became greater in number and more explicit in character—a lingering stare accompanied by a sharkish smirk, a flash of tongue through teeth, a deliberate cupping of the crotch. Or maybe they just seemed worse now he knew what they meant.

A restless wind howls at the door and Slayton fucks his throat. This time he comes on his face, almost tenderly, if that makes any sense. It wouldn't have, once, but it’s not just his ass that’s been turned inside-out. The warm streaks of seed lashing across his upturned nose, closed eyelids and outstretched tongue feel like life-giving rain, like kisses. He waggles his tongue to lap up all he can, then stops, seized with horror. No. No, this is wrong. For Christ’s sake, he’s not supposed to be _enjoying_ this.

But then Slayton pats his cheek and praises him, saying, ‘Good boy. Good, Diamond, you’re being so _good_.’ And it’s all okay again.

Slayton carefully rolls down the covers and lays him on his non-injured side. Diamond automatically goes into fœtal mode, and Slayton curls up behind him, holding him still while he slides his cock back where it belongs. Diamond lets out a wheezing gulp of horror, but once he’s in Slayton doesn’t move. Instead he hugs him like a damn teddy bear and heaves out, sounding nearly in tears, ‘Can’t believe what I almost did. Can’t fucking believe it. Nearly lost you. Jesus, sweetheart. Nearly lost you forever.’

A strange feeling swells within Diamond when he hears the endearment _,_ one he cannot recall anyone ever applying to him. Why is he doing this? Diamond knows what rape is like, and this ain’t it. Not any kind he’s partaken in, either as victim or perpetrator. It’s worse, actually. Slayton, it seems, isn’t content with his asshole, has to go fucking up his mind as well.

‘Slayton?’ he begins.

But Slayton shushes him with a kiss that’s gentle, but no less dominating for that, and says, ‘Go to sleep, Diamond. We’ll do it more in the morning.’

Diamond wakes up from Slayton raping him. Which really is no more than he expected. He half expected not to wake up at all, and more than half of him didn’t want to. But, nope, he’s still alive, and yup, the kid’s still at it. He probably didn’t pull out all night—hell, for all he knows, he fucked him in his sleep.

It actually took a while before his brain worked out that’s what was happening to him. Most people would wake up pretty damn quick if somebody holstered that much cock inside them, but for Diamond it’s a struggle to stay on the surface of the black sea that beckons to him, that begs to engulf him beneath its moveless tides. At first he was only dimly aware of a stabbing sensation in his torso. The region from his stomach to his thighs he could barely feel at all, except for a vague blur of discomfort, like the opposite of a phantom limb. Then there was a consciousness of something inhumanly big moving to and fro below his stomach, and the panic of not knowing what it was. Only gradually did the memory of the night before descend upon his thoughts.

He’s still so exhausted he can’t move anything, including his vocal cords, which feel as though they’ve been snapped like guitar strings by the same nasty motherfucker cramping his guts. He lets his eyes fall shut again as he’s ruthlessly fucked into wakefulness. Thankfully, Slayton isn’t paying attention to him, just using his body to get off.

When Slayton finishes he smacks his dick down on Diamond’s, the log kissing the twig hello, and Diamond comes, weakly, pathetically, just from Slayton’s fuckmuscle throbbing like a vibrator as he pumps out endless wads of sperm, as thick and ropy as yesterday when he came for the first time.

After that Slayton pecks his forehead and bounds out of bed, grotesquely chipper. Diamond gets up much more slowly, only because he knows he has to, only because he doesn’t want to still be laying there like an untrussed Thanksgiving turkey when Slayton gets the need in him again. There’s a ferocious burning in his ass and his whole lower abdomen feels pregnant with pain.

He stands on shaky pins, and takes in the sheets with their light come and dark sweat stains and the bright smear of red, before he’s staggering bowlegged to the bathroom to heave up what’s in his stomach, mostly come and bile. He doesn’t feel any better, after.

On the way out he's so intent on avoiding the mirror he almost slips in the trail of come his gaping ass has deposited on the tiles. The room smells like rape—similar to the smell of sex, but with more blood and despair. As for Diamond, he pretty much feels like he spent the night in the middle of a busy highway. Not as bad as it could be, though. There’s still enough medicine in his bloodstream he’s fairly disengaged from it all, the channels between nerve-endings and pain-receptors nice and sluggish. And since keeping it that way is the only way to stay sane, he makes the arduous march to his war bag, where he fishes through his stash to see if he can hook anything stronger than Codeine.

‘You got birth control in there?’ Slayton asks from where he’s standing by the window, drinking coffee out of a can and fidgeting with his dick, and cracks himself up.

Diamond thinks about hobbling over there, yanking up a bushel of ripe-wheat waves and driving the pointy end of the motel iron into the spot where skull meets spine. But then a wave of nausea overtakes him, and he has to sit on the floor before he ends up there some way that hurts a lot more. Not that being on his ass is much fun after last night.

There’s a little squirt of wetness when he sits down, and he thinks about just how much come Slayton stowed away inside him, just how surefire pregnant he’d be if a woman, and shivers despite the dry heat of the morning.

As the pharmaceuticals work their swift, soothing magic, and Diamond’s world opens out a little beyond the fluorescent walls of the motel room, he realises there’s a family in the room next door. They must have arrived that morning. He can hear kids bickering, a boy and a girl. Diamond is suddenly very thankful for the sepia-tinged voiles on the window, though even the mellow light that filters through them feels acute and scorching on his tenderised hide.

He half-sits, half-leans on the bed, keeping the weight on his hip rather than his ass. He has a couple plastic gas station snacks and tries to eat them, but his throat is scratchy and swollen, as from a bad cold, and in the end he coughs it all up again and spits it into the sink.

He sways backs across the room and collapses carefully onto the unused bed, face down, half longing to be smothered. He feels infinitely fragile, like he’s aged a hundred years in a day.

After not very long the pressure on his cast becomes too much, so he shifts onto his back without opening his eyes. He can hear Slayton shuffling around, but tries to pretend he can’t, tries to pretend he’s alone and last night was a bad dream or a childhood memory.

‘Lazy little bitch, aren’t ya?’ Slayton remarks.

Diamond slits his eyes open. ‘What?’

Slayton is regarding him with that odd mixture of fondness and contempt that seems to belong to an someone older. Then his face cracks into a grin, bright and terrifying. He crumples up the can one-handed and flings it at Diamond’s head, and comes hurtling after it like a bull that’s seen a rider on his ass. He vaults onto the first bed and launches off it, right at Diamond. ‘Cannonball!’

Diamon’s head snaps up in alarm. ‘Oh, man, no, please, my armaaaAHHHHHHfucking GOD!’

The impact is like swinging into a semi-trailer and the pain is immediate and as bad as it was in the arena. He wants to die he wants to die he wants to die he wants

Slayton’s mouth on his and Slayton’s tongue between his teeth. He bites down on instinct, a reflexive reaction to the torment raging like a live thing inside him. Slayton grunts and jerks away, sputtering bloody saliva into Diamond’s face. ‘Fucking _cunt_!’

Ice-cold fear sluices down the fiery heat of the pain. ‘Slayton, no, I swear I didn’t mean to. I didn’t do it on purpose I swear I swear I swear—’

Not only the words but the tone and pitch are that of his thirteen-year-old, pre-pubescent self. It’s like Slayton’s rebroken his voice as well as his shoulder. You never really got away. You thought you had, but you never could. It was just like a cartoon cat toying with a mouse, letting the little thing scamper with all its might, but the cat’s claw was on its tail the whole time.

Yet whether Slayton enjoys Diamond’s involuntary regression, or whether he can tell he’s hurt enough, Diamond sees the fist that had already formed relaxing, the fingers unfurling one by one.

Then the next wave comes, and he arches into it, straining every muscle in his body like he can force it out through sheer physical exertion, the way you do with a bitten tongue. Nothing happens except it gets worse and it gets worse and it gets worse, and finally he slackens into a weeping ragdoll. He rolls from one side of the bed to the other, clutching himself and moaning in a futile effort to shake out the hurt. He doesn’t care if Slayton does hit him. It can’t feel worse than this. Christ, he’d even welcome the kid's cuntwrecker just to put his mind on a different pain.

‘Aw, hut your ickhoe,’ Slayton says, poking inside his mouth, but Diamond can’t, he can’t, he can’t, it hurts so _bad._

‘I said to shut the fuck up, you fucking cunt! Christ, you piss me off. I swear if you don’t, I’ll fuck—’

‘Fuck me, then!’ he bursts out, mouth running ahead of his mind. ‘Slayton, please, I just can’t—I need—’ He dissolves once more into sobs. A disconnected part of himself is struck by the sheer variety of noises he’s making: sometimes loud, sometimes almost inaudible, sometimes low and abrasive like a cat’s hiss, sometimes soaring into a bird’s warble. No wonder Slayton’s getting pissed off.

Slayton sighs, as though it’s a chore, but comes back to the bed, squeezing a stiffy out of his cock, which is already halfway there.

He has more tablets in his hand, and he crams them between Diamond’s lips, then upends a bottle over his upturned face. The water goes all over him, into his eyes, into his hair, up his nose, but enough of it goes in his mouth to force the medicine down. Enough of it goes down that his screams turn to coughs, the kind that shred the whole body. In the meantime, Slayton is breaking his legs out of fœtal position, spreading them wide and plunging in.

He takes him on his back this time, his feet on Slayton’s shoulders, Slayton’s hands around his neck, Slayton’s prick driving up into his prostate, sending agonising tingles through his over-stimulated, over-climaxed cock. Thumbs digging into his windpipe with each lunge. Watching the light wink in and out in his eyes. Diamond doesn’t know when or what Slayton rejiggered in his greymatter, but at this point it feels more right than wrong.

Bile rises in his throat, but it can’t get past Slayton's chokehold. His head feels like a hot-air balloon about to burst but without the air. Slayton’s hair has fallen over his eyes and sweat is flying off it, into Diamonds gasping mouth. The violating presence is panic, but the restraining arms are comfort and safety, and the inability to reconcile the two meanings of his powerlessness is short-circuiting what’s left of his brain. If he has one consolation, a relief that’s also his grief, it’s that eighteen-year-olds don’t last long. A dozen more pulverising thrusts and Slayton’s cock presses up, his thumbs press in and they stay there, stay there till the inside of his head is like a telephone exchange and the stars shimmer into view once more. Diamond comes with a liquid wail and blacks out.

When Diamond resurfaces Slayton is polishing off a greasy hot breakfast he bought from somewhere. _His_ appetite, at least, is undented. When he sees Diamond’s awake he lets out a shameless belch and stands up, shucking his jeans to the floor. He’s not wearing underpants and yup, there it is, Diamond’s old doom. Diamond would honestly suspect Viagra if he hadn’t himself been eighteen and fuckless only a few years ago. In any event, Slayton’s dick seems to be in the mood for yet another go-round.

He picks a bagel out of a paper bag and fits it over his cock, the shiny brown ring forming little white cracks as he forces it down on a pole too big for the hole. ‘You want one?’ Slayton asks, peppy like piss on a wound. ‘I got a dozen.’

Diamond slides to the floor. This time he _really_ wants to hurl. He wants to pass out again, but he’s had fucking enough of that. He meets Slayton’s eyes, and doesn’t flinch, even though inside he’s quivering.

Fuck that. Fuck the fear. If Slayton wants a re-ride, Diamond’s gonna fucking give him one. He’s survived till now, hasn’t he? He’s taken this shit his whole life, yet here he is. How much more damage can one boy do?

Emboldened by this new resolve, relying on the power of pain-stoppers to do just that, and scared fresh out of his wits by how close the past twenty-four hours have carried him to his final end, and not any kind he wants on his death certificate; by how easy Slayton could actually do it if he got it in his bipolar brain to do so, Diamond, being too unsteady to walk, crawls to where Slayton is sitting. He pulls the stupid bagel apart with his teeth, then climbs into Slayton’s lap.

All he knows is it hurts when he has Slayton’s cock in him, but he gets hurt worse when he doesn't. Slayton is tall, and Diamond likes that. Doesn’t he? Isn’t that what he always liked? It’s so hard to think.

There’s a flare of lip-biting heat when he forces the glans past his puffy-raw ring, but after that he sinks all the way down without slowing, by the time he hits the base his own prick is fattening. Slayton gives an appreciative whistle.

Diamond fits comfortably on his lap. Snugly. Slayton's dick fits snugly inside him. The burn is almost soothing at this point. It somehow takes the edge of all his other aches.

He holds onto the back of the chair with his working arm and from there it’s merely a matter of up and down, and now and then side to side or round and round to shake things up, all the things buckle-bitches would do to make a good time better. Slayton coos and hollers at these tricks, which gives Diamond a weird twinge of satisfaction. Unlike the kid Diamond has plenty of practice in this arena, just from the other side.

Slayton lets him set the speed for a while, but eventually becomes impatient. He picks Diamond up by the hips and drags him all the way to the tip of his Tower of Terror before dropping him again, bucking up to meet him halfway, banging into bones which feel too brittle to take it for much longer.

Diamond wails, but doesn’t try to pull off. Instead he pushes down harder, rolling into Slayton’s rhythm, his dick knocking back and forth between them like a clacker in a castanet. While Slayton’s hurting him with his cock he isn’t hurting him with his hands. While he’s breaking his insides he’s not breaking his outsides. Diamonds not sure if it’s a sensible trade-off, but at least this can also feel good, in a sick way. At least this is making Slayton happy, and happy Slayton is less likely to hurt him, he hopes.

‘Damn, but I could get used to this. Tightest piece a cunt I had since I came out my momma’s.’ As if to maximise the tightness, maximise the sensation around his nerve-wrecking dick, he moulds Diamond’s flesh around himself with his broad hands clamped over Diamond’s asscheeks, the cleft in his chin riding the bridge of Diamonds nose. ‘Fuck yeah, babe, hurt yourself on my cock.’

Gonna grind me all to dust, Diamond thinks. Back to the beginning, back to rammy old sunuvasod Adam who just couldn’t fucking leave it alone. Dem bones done walked around long enough.

After Slayton comes for the first time he stands up from the chair without warning, and Diamond has to throw his limbs around him to keep from cracking his head on the chipped tiles. He holds on tight, the world wheeling and smudging like he’s on a themepark ride as Slayton takes him ( _jouncing him up and down, up and down, all the way, not missing a thrust with each stride_ ) to the mirror outside the bathroom and shows him.

In Redsled he heard of a girl who sat on a fire hydrant and had to get sawed off and carried to hospital with it still stuck inside her. Wallace said there weren’t any fire hydrants in Redsled dumbass, and Muir said it musta been a fencepost, and Diamond was too busy soundlessly jerking off and crying in the back seat to say anything.

Since then Diamond's been in a lot of arena showers, seen a lot of meat, and Slayton is the thickness of at least four regular dicks stapled together. And the length—Diamond doesn’t even want to think about _that_. Slayton shows him anyway, twists him round _—on_ his cock, which is a sensation Diamond is once more without words for—and shows him the alien shadow of himself moving inside Diamond's body. He wants to come and throw up at the same time. He looks like a fucking _child._ He’s so tiny, he’s

‘Perfect,’ Slayton mutters against his neck. ‘You’re goddamn perfect. Perfect fuckin size for my cock.’

He lifts Diamond’s legs up so his knees are touching his shoulders, so it’s all there, unavoidable as a car-crash, the impossible hugeness of Slayton’s evil dick annihilating Diamond’s ass, a raw red wound that by now would be loose and sloppy for anyone else, for all the guys Slayton said have been wanting to mount him forever, but around Slayton's enormity is still bruise-tight.

Diamond moans in horror, but can’t look away, not even when Slayton comes, and places Diamonds sweaty hand between his ribs where he can feel it bubbling like an oil-well under the gristle of his abdomen. Not even when Slayton’s cock flicks out of his asshole with a painful jerk and several meaty spurts of come slap into the mirror. Not even when he’s left staring at what that cock has done to him.

Slayton tilts his hips up so there’s no missing it, so the ruin of what used to be his anus is displayed in its full, foul glory. Diamond has been fucked so far open his sphincter has disappeared, and in its place is a perfectly circular hole cut out of his body, so deep and wide Diamond could put his whole fist in there and never touch the sides. Slayton has eviscerated him. Seconds elapse and it doesn’t even try to close itself. Or it can’t. Sweet Jesus child, he can see right inside. He is staring straight into the depths of his own ruined body. It’s so wrong. It’s so _red._

It’s at that point he finally faints.

He wakes on his back, on the bed, and feels relief until he also feels Slayton _still_ inside him, and realises it was the pain that woke him.

He guesses he goes kind of crazy, sobbing and wailing with inarticulate noises and making sounds that would freak him the fuck out even if it was someone else making them. And it somehow does feel like it’s someone else. Like he, so long spent trying to claw out of his skin, is at last on the outside looking in, at this jittery, squalling wreck of a human being. It’s all weirdly interesting.

And Slayton is laughing. Slayton is laughing as he keeps on thrusting and Diamond hollers and sunfishes all over the bed. Eventually Diamond joins in, a eunuch whinny that is the most ghastly thing he’s heard, that even disturbs Slayton enough he hits Diamond upside the head a few times, then puts a pillow over his mouth, which won’t stop pitching out these freaky noises.

And Slayton doesn't stop either, doesn't pull out or pull back or miss one rapid, bone-jiving thrust. Jesus Christ, he just won't _stop_. It’s like a honeymoon gone wrong. Is he going to fuck Diamond forever?

When’s Slayton’s ready to blow—and it take a little longer, given how many times he already has that morning—he lifts the pillow off and puts his pisshole right under Diamond’s nose. A couple rough tugs and he shoots off right up his nostrils.

‘What the fuck?’ Diamond says, snorting out a vile blend of cocksnot and actual snot. Some of it gets in his mouth. The randomness of it shocks him out of his hysteria. Is the kid trying to drown him in jizz now?

Slayton shrugs and lets out a little giggle. ‘Just wanted to. Just for fun.’ He aims his fucking-piece down, and the final spurts leave a slimy signature on the blue wadding of Diamond’s cast. How the hell does this kid have so much damn spunk in him?

‘Christ, what is wr— _why_?’

The smile falls off the kid’s face. ‘Because I can. Because you can’t stop me. I can do whatever the fuck I want to you and you can’t do a fucking thing about it.’

Diamond really can’t argue with that. He wipes his nose on his arm, then wipes his arm on the sheets. Tears collect in the points of his eyes but he doesn’t let them fall. He moves to wipe his cast, but Slaton says, ‘Leave it!’ in a whipcord tone. Diamond reaches for him, pathetic and knowing it, but needing reassurance of some kind, even from the hand of his tormenter; hating himself for needing it yet needing it all the same. But Slayton brushes him off and walks away.

It’s getting on to noon. Slayton is watching t.v.—rodeo, this time. Diamond thinks he preferred the porn. He’s clean and dressed, has taken no food but downed three-quarters of his emergency liquor, and, all things considered, feels as okay as he’s likely to for the foreseeable. His everything hurts like hell, but his head is clearer. He’s decided from now on he’s gonna ease right off the pain-killers, or at least as far as he can. It's bad enough his body's all bent out of shape; he doesn't like feeling like a stranger in his own head.

Their bags are packed—Diamond packed both of them, and tidied the room, or at least put it back to the way it was. When he re-mounted the elk head he saw two things: the jizzstain on its nose looks like a patch of paler fur, and both its eyes are brown. He sits on the edge of his bed, watching Slayton’s eyes follow the movements of man and bull, trying to think of how to give the nudge in a way that isn’t gonna touch off any brushfires.

‘You still gonna watch me on the t.v.?’ he says at last, voice as normal as he can make it since, at least it’s over now, right? Londa Sasser has had her honour avenged, Slayton has gotten his rocks off, and this is where he rides off into the sunset and leaves Diamond to try to piece himself back into something approximately human. Please God, it has to be over.

Slayton sighs, not looking around. ‘Diamond, you’re a special kind of stupid, ain’t you?

Diamond tries for levity. ‘Guess you fucked my brains out.’

Slayton snorts and says, ‘Bitch, you ain’t got no brains to fuck out.’

He switches the t.v. off and stands up. Even though he’s already unbuckling his belt, his voice is calm and deathly serious. ‘You will never ride again, you hear?’

He picks him up by the hips and swings him onto the bed again, and Diamond instinctively assumes the position, dropped like a bucking steer, braced on his right arm, head on the pillow and hips hauled high to present his ass to the morning sun. Slayton’s prong slides in with hardly a sting.

‘You fucking raped my sister like an animal, you sunuvabitch and then you laughed about it. I swear, if I hafta saw your fucking legs off and keep you in the boot of my truck—you ain’t never having a life again. Believe that. You ain’t entitled to one.’

He claps his hand on Diamond’s crotch, pinching his long-forgotten cock, and his touch is as tender as it is cruel. ‘This is done, you hear? Might as well cut the fuckin thing off for all the use it’s gonna be to you from now on. So get that fuckin clear in your head, boy.’

At last it is clear. Horribly, wonderfully clear. This boy’s a freak and a pervert, yes, but he’s also on some frighteningly proximate level an avenging angel, and Diamond just happened to be caught on the wrong side of paradise.

Something smacks into on the side of his head, and for a far-out moment Diamond thinks Slayton’s grown a third arm to go with his third leg. Then he realises it’s Slayton’s foot on his face, mashing it into the mattress.

Slayton is right above him now, hunched over proper doggy-style and going at like he’s in heat. He imagines what it would look like to anyone watching, what someone who walked in right now would see. Diamond being mounted like a literal bitch, ass splitting open for each plunge of Slayton’s flaming-hot sword. Totally dominated, totally owned. Captive to this crazy love that’s never gonna let him go.

The couple in the next room are fighting with their kids and each other, and trying to stop the kids fighting each other. Slayton makes no attempt to be quiet, if anything gets more vocal, with grunts of appreciation and all the nasty names in the book, all of which sets Diamond’s dick a-chubbing even as his mind is reeling.

‘Slayton, Slayton, you gotta stop, those people, they’re gonna hear.’

‘Let em. Fuckin let em. Let em hear what a nasty fuckin whore you are.’

Slayton lifts him up and bodies him into the wall, face smashed into what are either especially psychedelic designs or mildew stains. Jesus, there are children just a few inches of drywall away from where Diamond is getting dicked down. His nose throbs. Is it broke? Slayton’ll be pissed if he made him ugly.

His cock is pounding so fucking far into his mangled guts he feels like he’s about to spew out organ soup. But he can take it. He knows that now. It ain’t gonna kill him. Fate never let him off that easy.

‘Well, you great oaf, if we’d stopped off in Hollett Hills like you _said_ we were gonna _._ ’ The woman’s voice, sandpaper-screechy, uncanny echo of his mother, is right in his ear.

Something surges up his throat—not the power-blended residue of his innards but a sound, whether a howl of pain or moan of pleasure or some unholy combination of both he doesn’t know. He gnaws the wallpaper, desperate not to let it out, wondering wildly what’ll happen if he does. But Slayton hauls him off with a growl and walks him forward with his dick shoving him along, pretty much the only thing keeping him on his feet. His feet can barely touch the floor. Slayton fuck-marches him across the room on his toe-tips to stand in front of the window.

There’s a couple of cowboys outside, in the parking lot. One of them kinda looks like a guy Diamond knew at riding school in California.

Oh God, they’re turning toward the window. They’re staring right through the voiles. Diamond can see them so clearly. How is it they can’t see him? Or maybe they do see, and just don’t care. Isn’t this what Diamond’s made for? So many of the men he’s known seem to come to that conclusion, sooner or later.

‘Wish they could see,’ Slayton pants. ‘Wish the whole fuckin world could see what you are.’ Then, ‘Don’t you cry. Don’t you fuckin cry. Only people get to cry. You ain't a person. You ain't even an animal. You're a piece of meat. Piece of meat for me to stick my dick in.’ But while he said it he was kissing Diamond's left cheek, as if to release the pale galaxy of moles from the dark nebulae of bruises that had engulfed them.

Outside, the strip of lawn where Slayton pissed a river is still squishy. When Diamond steps into it brown liquid bubbles up from around the roots of the grass.

‘Could make you drink that’, Slayton says with a wide, easy, Okie farmboy grin. He has a bag swinging from each shoulder and is in a fine mood.

Diamond shudders, and says nothing. He clings to Slayton’s arm. What's important right now is that he puts the absolute minimum of weight on any part of his body, and does nothing whatever to piss Slayton off.

Halfway across the gravel he senses Slayton twist around, hears him exchange words with someone, and cringes against him, trying to hide himself behind his bulk. He doesn’t want to see who it is, if it is Rulon Wade from California, see the question in his eyes and the pity and disgust when it’s answered.

Thankfully, Slayton doesn’t stop, and they make it to the car without further incident. Slayton opens the door for him, like a gentleman, and Diamond, who can already feel the murder this old hoopy is going to perpetrate on his black and blue behind, puts his sweater down on the seat. He peers timidly at Slayton, wondering if he’ll take it away, but he doesn’t. He seems to like the way Diamond's looking at him though, because he pulls him up for a long, _long_ kiss. He’s a better kisser than any eighteen-and-a-half year old has a right to be, and Diamond has a brief flash of wondering how this would have gone down if Slayton had done it the way he said he always wanted to.

Teeth catch on his lips, a pinching pain, and a big hot tongue is wriggling so far down his throat he’s sure it means to choke him.

Who's he kidding? Diamond never got the sweet’n’gentle treatment in his life not once not from nobody. This kid come at him with hearts in his eyes and he’da slugged him into the next millennium.

Just when Diamond’s body--battered, bruised, abused thing it is--is warming to the kiss, Slayton ends it as abruptly as he began it, virtually throwing him into the car. He sits down, heavily, and the pain does a ghostly dance from the base of his spine to his neck. He can almost see it, red filaments of fire twisting through bone and tissue, tracing the vast hollow space where Slayton’s dick was, and will be.

The agony is so constant now, the thing Slayton did to him last night was so thorough, it doesn’t register the way it used to. He has been moved beyond a normal relationship with pain, to something like what he imagines the dancers of the Blackfeet had in their days of fasting, giving flesh to gain the favour of a bloodgreedy Sun.

At any rate, he does not mind it so much as he does the awful emptiness inside of him. He’ll never be right again, he knows it. Slayton broke him forever, _did_ something to him inside his ass, inside his head that neither time nor medicine’ll heal.

Slayton pitches the bags into the back with a crash that makes Diamond jump. He’s already treating it like it’s his car, which makes sense: slaves can’t own property. He drops into the driver’s seat, stares at Diamond, strokes Diamond's legs from his crotch to his knees, as if considering.

Diamond remembers what he said and a wave of cold blows through him, top to tail, like a wind from a wintry heaven.

‘ _Please_...’

Diamond’s aware he’s probably said that word more in the last twenty-four hours than he has in the last twenty-three years. In response Slayton whacks him in the face, the head, scrabbles a stubbly fistful of hair and yanks it, jabs him in the stomach, the throat, the side, horse-bites his thighs, punches his cast a few times, pitches his head into the window and the dash like a football, not because he’s angry, but because he knows Diamond won’t be.

And sure enough, Diamond doesn’t react to any of it beyond the unavoidable wince or whimper, just keeps on staring at the windshield, wondering if the water sheeting over his vision is on the outside as well. If he would be able to hear rain if he could hear anything through the ringing in his ears.

‘Damn. This piece a hardware really did a number on ya, huh? Hello, Apollo to bitch, anyone at home? Guess not. _Fuuuck_. Fuck, if that ain’t the hottest fuckin thing. My own personal fleshlight and punching bag. Look at me, baby.’

Diamond looks at him and is once more pierced by how beautiful he is, even or especially through tears. ‘Please, Slayton. I’m sorry.’ These seem to be the only words he has left.

‘You gonna try to run from me, bitch?’

‘No, Slayton, I swear.’

‘If you do, I will hunt you down, and I will fuck the piss outta you and then I’ll cut off your legs and fuck the piss outta you some more.’

‘I won’t, Slayton.’

Slayton cocks his head back and regards him. Fine pale brows draw together, neat tombstone teeth worry at a slender pink lip, and Diamond finds himself wishing for the demon with the golden antlers and fiery prick, because that would be less frightening and easier to understand.

‘Maybe I should break your other arm, just in case.’

The uninflected casualness of his tone, as if he was musing on where they should stop for lunch, makes Diamond go tight with fear. He tries to put all of it, the bottomlessness of his submission and the totality of his newfound devotion, into his eyes, to make Slayton see there can’t be any ‘in case’, there’s nothing left in Diamond but what Slayton put into him with his cock and his fist.

Slayton yanks Diamond’s good arm to him, wraps his fingers around it on either side the bend in his elbow and squeezes, trying out how easy it would snap. Diamond remembers the coin tearing like tissue paper, the two halves flying at him like silver bullets. Something is keening like a kicked dog, and after a beat he realises it’s him.

Something of this seems to touch Slayton, and his face softens. ‘But then I'd hafta feed you. And wipe your ass. Urgh. Fine, you get t’keep it. For now, I guess.’

Diamond weeps all over Slayton crotch, consumed by absurd, pathetic gratitude. Slayton pulls him up by the throat, holding tight enough Diamond’s vision goes kinda fuzzy at the edges. Or maybe that’s just from being smacked around so much. But it’s the damndest thing, the panic doesn’t resurface, even though he can’t breathe right, even though he could die here in this boy’s hands. It’s as if even that’s been stripped away from him.

Slayton massages tears into bruises with the pad of his thumb, strong but smooth hands that probably never so much as touched a pitchfork.

He actually looks shaken by what he’s done, what Diamond in the course of a single night and day of terror has become. But shaken in a good way, rejoicing over the work of his hands, surveying the ruins of a personality and deeming it good. ‘Jesus. I’ve seen some pretty things, but God fuck em all if you crying doesn’t take the cake every time. Say you love me.’

His words bestow the cruelty of self-consciousness: Diamond remembers what he must look like and feels like puking, like clawing off his own face. Jesus Christ, he’s a man, how can he—

He pushes it away. He can’t think about that. About any of it. He can’t. ‘I love you, Slayton. I love you so fuckin much. Please be nice to me. Please fuck me—I need your cock so bad, ‘m so empty, but please, please do it nice, I’ll be so good, such a good bitch for your dick—’

Slayton shuts him up with a closed-handed slap. Diamond kisses the hand and then cradles it against his face the way Pearl did with his as a baby. He must be off his head, but it does make him feel better. As long as he doesn’t think about anything that was before they checked into the motel, about anything that is outside the metal box of the car, he can cope.

‘Who are you, babe?’

‘I’m nobody’, he replies. It makes sense. If he’s the son of nobody, that makes him a nobody, too, right? He might have said, "I’m a cowboy," but he’s not that anymore either, as of last night. So what does that leave him to be but nothing?

Slayton’s looking at him like he expects some elaboration and will turn very violent very quickly if he doesn’t get it, so Diamond elaborates, putting as much sultry slut into his voice as he can separate from the sick and scared.

‘I’m your bitch. I’m your cunt. I’m a hungry hole for your cock. I’m a whore and I always want it. I always wanted it. I rode bulls cause I couldn’t get the real thing.’ At this Diamond chokes on his own raggedy breath. A spasm passes over his face, like the memory of anger, or shame, trying to recollect itself. He forces himself to finish. ‘Please, Slayton, hurt me. Tear me up with your giant dick. Use me like—how…’

He trails off, excruciatingly aware of how wrong it all sounds, coming out in his drugslurred, throatfucked yet unambiguously male voice.

Slayton says nothing, but looks satisfied. He takes Diamond’s smokes out of the glovebox and then flicks his eyes down to the omnipresent bulge in his jeans.

Diamond undoes the zip with his teeth, tugs Slayton's cock out by the ample foreskin, opens his mouth as wide as it’ll go, and slides down by increments, until it feels like all the air in his lungs has been displaced by dick. He bobs on and off the best he can, groaning and blowing now and then from the pain in his back, which Slayton seems to enjoy. Whether it’s the persistent low-level feeling of suffocation or the overpowering scent from Slayton’s crotchhair ( _for a moment he’s back in the hot springs, breathing sulphur_ ) his eyes are watering, and the tears roll down his nose to mingle with his spit and the sweat dropping off his forehead.

Up and down, key in the ignition, flick of a lighter, growl of the motor (how does the piece of shit start so smoothly for him when Diamond has to fight a pitched battle every morning just to get a wheeze out of it?). Crunch of gravel, gargle of prefuck and saliva and hacking of too much cock and not enough oxygen, and through it all the slap-squelch of Diamond’s throat being repurposed for a cunt.

Slayton inhales rapidly, jerking his thighs as far apart as they’ll go, as if his orgasm needs the room to arrive, and Diamond’s stupid slut mouth waters in anticipation of a creamy load. But after he’s blown his wad down Diamond’s throat, he puffs a warm stream of smoke onto the back of Diamond’s neck and says, ‘Fuck, I gotta take a leak.’

Why didn’t you go in the motel, is what Diamond would have said if he weren’t a no-name know-nothing no-account whore whose mouth is only good for fucking.

A heavy hand descends on the back of his head, pulls him up so the fat, oozing head is weighing down his tongue. When Slayton lets out a sigh and Diamond’s mouth floods with hot, sour-tasting liquid too thin and too copious to be come, he knows what to do. He’s nobody, and this is what he was made for. If Slayton prefers his face to a urinal, that’s his prerogative and Diamond’s privilege, and he _is_ grateful for it. So grateful he could weep. Which he does. But he also swallows it all.

Afterward he sits up and reaches for the bottle of sunboiled Gatorade in the cupholder to rinse his mouth, in case Slayton wants to kiss him again. His stomach feels tight, the way it did after a Thanksgiving dinner, when he still had those. It occurs to him with a belated start that Slayton had been frenching him in the parking lot in broad daylight, where any fucking body could have seen, and Diamond didn’t even think. But then, what would it matter if someone had? What business is it of anybody else’s what Slayton does with his own toys?

Slayton clears his throat like he’s made a decision. ‘We ain’t going to Texas. Ain’t seeing no rodeo. Hell, you ain’t seeing nothin an nobody ever again. I’m taking you up to the mountains. We got a cabin there, in the state park. There is so much more I am going to teach you, baby-boy. You may reckon you’ve hit bitch-bottom, but I’m here to tell you you ain’t even scratched the surface. You got a _long_ way to go, and it’ll be hot as hell all the way down.’

‘Thank you, Slayton. I love you,’ Diamond says, though he can hardly get the words out for trembling. It occurs to him, in a flash of soft catastrophe, that he never got past it, or through it, or over it, at all, that it was there all the time, only dulled, not dispelled, the lever gummed into panic mode twenty-four seven, and he’s too numb to feel it. And thank God for it. Thank God for the small mercies, although they’re the cruellest. The old divinities turned the violated into trees; the new one turns them into lepers.

‘Open your mouth, slut.’

Diamond opens his mouth, this time not sure what for. Slayton takes a long drag on the cigarette, then blows it all into Diamond’s mouth, and Diamond drinks it down. It sinks into his lungs, cloying and hot like tar. Perhaps uniquely among his class, he’s never been a smoker, but at this point what’s one more addiction?

Slayton carefully puts the cigarette out in Diamond’s belly-button. Diamond drops his head forward and bites the wrinkled plastic of the glovebox. More tears come, but no screams. What’s one more wound? At least it wasn’t his cock.

Slayton’s own cock is still out, laid on the fake leather between his legs. He’s sitting all the way back, but even soft it’s so long the tip is dropping clear wet pearls over the edge of the seat. Diamond looks at it rather than the scenery he feels unworthy to behold, or the minivans and pick-ups and eighteen-wheelers full of normal people who will surely read the whole history of his degradation in his face, and don’t deserve to have their day spoiled by a sight like that.

He drinks men’s piss. What right does he have to look anyone in the eye, or anything higher than the crotch? So long as he keeps looking down, he can’t see how far he’s fallen.

They drive, away from the Line’s End Motel with its old neon sign blinking a forlorn farewell, or perhaps a warning Diamond missed. Slayton pulls over every few dozen miles, breaking Diamond out of his painkiller-trance to take him right there in the front passenger seat, perpetually wolfish dick ravening his bowels, back of his head bashing into the window, highway roaring on behind, cars full of people who must be able to hear Diamond screaming but don’t give a shit. And why should they, when not even he does?

After the fourth or fifth time Diamond doesn’t bother putting on his clothes again. They’re going up into the mountains; there won’t be anybody to see him. He’s too hot, anyway. Hot like hellfire. No matter how much Gatorade he swills, he can’t taste anything but Slayton's smoke and come and piss.

They drive, until the daylight slips behind and the sky paints itself gold, then blue, then grey, then black. By the time he’s due for his next dose of mind-killers the Gatorade’s run out, and when he checks in the back it turns out Slayton’s drunk all the water.

‘What am I gonna wash them down with?’ he whispers, not relishing the prospect of crunching down aspirin dry.

In reply Slayton squeezes Diamond’s face till his mouth pops opens like a goldfish’s, drops in the pills and pushes the head of his dick in after them. ‘Good thing my bladder’s full, babe.’

Diamond drinks, and drinks and drinks, and has less of an urge to throw up than the first time. The taste has sort of faded, which he hopes it continues to, because this is probably how it’s gonna be from hereonout. Slayton wasn’t lying. Diamond is learning so much already, which scares him, because they haven’t even reached the mountains yet. If Slayton already has him guzzling piss like a pig, taking beatings like a boxer, God knows what he’ll do to him up there.

They drive. The radio plays grating pop bullshit, and Slayton drums his fingers on the steering-wheel and shakes his golden mane to the beat. He looks so goofy, so normal, so much the kid he is. How could Diamond have thought there was something wrong with him? The wrong was all with _him,_ always and Slayton did what needed to be done to put it right. And will continue to until all arrears have been paid. Diamond is blessed to have such a patient, yet firm, instructor; he knows it and he gives thanks, Amen And God Bless Merka.

As they turn off the interstate onto the narrow, silent road into the mountains, there’s another neon sign at the junction in the shape of a cross. It says BE SURE YOUR SINS WILL FIND YOU OUT in gory scarlet letters.

Diamond kisses Slayton's fly and asks to have the air-conditioning on, but it doesn’t help. The heat’s inside of him. He can’t get it out.

**Author's Note:**

> meant to have this done in time for IFD but EXAMS lul
> 
> Also, I whipped this up on artbreeder as maybe sorta kinda what Slayton looks like:  
> 
> 
> Idk I don't really have a mental image of characters per se, just more of a vague sense of what they look like. For Slayton it's pretty much just generic handsome dude with blue eyes and longish blond hair.


End file.
